Concept ship

Here's an attempt at a concept art-style spaceship, using techniques I picked up while studying digital painting from various sources:

Considering it's the first time I've really tried this style, I'm pretty happy with it... I've read and watched a bunch of tutorials, and it's nice to finally put some of what I've learned into practice.

Ships ahoy!

So lately I've started carrying around two small sketchbooks, one for drawing from life, and one for doodling down ideas (mostly spaceship designs at this point). One for capturing what I see with my eyes, the other for capturing what I see in my head...

Here are a couple ship sketches:

Bus sketches

Gamut mapping

Color study of an alien attack drone:

This was an exercise in gamut mapping using a triadic color scheme, something I picked up from James Gurney's Color and Light. I started out with a grayscale drawing, then when over it with washes of yellow-orange, green and purple. Wasn't very precise about it, but I think it holds together well overall. Knowledge!

Have Sketchpad-Will Travel

It's warmed up a little bit in the last few days, enough that I can take off my gloves and do some quick sketching on the bus without having my fingers feel like they're going to fall off...

Shading studies

Here are some ink doodles I took into Photoshop, playing around with light and shadow:

Btw, I love the new Sharpie pen with the rubber grip. Fantastic drawing tool.

I've been spending my down time reading up on illustration blogs and tutorials, just trying to soak up some knowledge. However, I haven't done much in the way of trying to apply that knowledge, so that's a goal of mine right now.

Yoshiyuki Takani, Master Robot Painter

I've been a fan of Yoshiyuki Takani's artwork since I was a kid... I never connected the man's name to his work until today, when I read an entry on Felix Ip's blog. Since the 60's, Takani has been renowned for his paintings adorning the boxes for plastic models of tanks, planes and mecha from anime like Macross, Votoms, Panzer World Galient-- pretty much anything with a robot in it, he painted. His dynamic illustrations gave robots real weight, making it easy to imagine these hulking machines bounding around with a tangible vitality.

I managed to cull a couple examples of his artwork from the web: